Remembering Bob Shatkin

Most people knew Bob Shatkin, who died suddenly of an aneurysm in 2001, as a patriarch of the New York blues scene and as a legendary teacher of harmonica at the New School. I knew him as my boss. We worked together in the Language and Literature Department of the Brooklyn Public Library for four or five years in the nineties. It was a bit unusual to revise this month's or that month's book order budget with a supervisor who had played with "Muddy" and "Wolf." And who was incredibly smart, funny, streetwise, and the best raconteur I've ever known. For example: once during my twice annual service review, when Bob and a second supervisor were going over my "works well with others" thing, Bob was conscientiously describing my strengths and weaknesses as a reference librarian when he began shoveling invisible shit, as if to say: Well, yes, I take my professional responsibilities seriously but maybe not that seriously. But really he shoveled the shit just to put me at my ease. Or again, how many librarians begin their day, before the doors open to the public, with their boss pulling out a harp from his pocket and demonstrating for them a perfectly executed railroad shuffle or a little sample of Sonny Boy Williamson? For all his brilliance (and occasional gruffness), Bob was an extremely modest man. I have a tape of some of his performances, one of which is a slow blues that turns into a smoldering duet between Bob and a female singer (whose name I wish I knew) until Bob takes it away with a second overdubbed harp at the close. It's a astounding. And what did Bob have to say? "Ah, you know, it's just a jingle -- could have been a Coke commercial," or words to that effect. I can't help but feel a bit disappointed that in the end Bob turned away from performing and abandoned the history of blues harmonica that the University of Mississippi Press had contracted him to write. What a book that would have been! Emerson said of Thoreau, "I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. Wanting this, instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party." Bob could have done much more with his music and his scholarship, but I guess he just preferred to be happy, spending his last years researching paleontology (about which he was ferociously well informed) and going home each day to his lovely girlfriend Judy. Well, I miss him, the gray-beard wild man at the reference desk with his ponytail and shining earring and loud Hawaiian shirts. Once I asked him about an article in Rolling Stone I had read years before about the J. Geils Band. (He knew Magic Dick, of course, and Peter Wolf and Mike Bloomfield and Kim Wilson and seemingly everybody else.) The author quoted Muddy Waters saying of Magic Dick, "If he eat pussy like he play harp, he a motherfucker." I always wondered about the authenticity of that line, but before I could finish the sentence Bob cut me off. "Never!" he said. "Muddy never talked like that. He was kingly."